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Quotations on Temptation

“Satan gives Adam an apple, and takes away Paradise. Therefore in all temptations let us consider not what he offers, but what we shall lose.” – Richard Sibbes

“A celebrated decadent wrote, ‘The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it’. Yet that unhappy man himself was a complete contradiction of his own epigram; his life narrowed and darkened to a dungeon because he was unable to get rid of the hideous desires that he had satisfied. Yielding to a temptation is like yielding to a blackmailer; you pay to be free, and find yourself the more enslaved.” – G. K. Chesterton, Daily News, August 8, 1908.

“Temptations are like tramps. Treat them kindly, and they will return bringing others with them.” – Dwight L. Moody

“When you catch yourself overstepping the line in any sense, that’s where you have to physically say no. And you can do this. The Bible teaches very clearly that we can say yes or no — no matter what our desires. Ask God to shout at you when you need to say no, and to give you the power He promised.” – Jill Briscoe

“Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. … We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.” – C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.” – Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“If you will tell me when God permits a Christian to lay aside his armour, I will tell you when Satan has left off temptation. Like the old knights in war time, we must sleep with helmet and breastplate buckled on, for the arch-deceiver will seize our first unguarded hour to make us his prey. The Lord keep us watchful in all seasons, and give us a final escape from the jaw of the lion and the paw of the bear.” – Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening

“His Majesty [the Lord] . . . rewards great services with trials, and there can be no better reward, for out of trials springs love for God.” – Teresa of Avila

“Temptations, when we first meet them, are like a lion that roared at Samson; but if we overcome them, the next time we see them we shall find a nest of honey within them.” – John Bunyan

“We usually know what we can do, but temptation shows us who we are.” – Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

“As the most dangerous winds may enter at little openings, so the devil never enters more dangerously than by little unobserved incidents, which seem to be nothing, yet insensibly open the heart to great temptations.” – John Wesley

“The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.” – T. S. Eliot